


Place of Safety

by Lilith



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Bondage, F/F, Fanart, Nudity, Subspace, Suspension, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-08
Updated: 2017-10-08
Packaged: 2019-01-10 12:30:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12299289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilith/pseuds/Lilith
Summary: When her brother was finally dead, the relief Margot was expecting just ... hadn't come.





	Place of Safety

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dreamkist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamkist/gifts).



> This was supposed to be a fanart gift, but then it wanted words, too. Thank you for the prompt, dreamkist!
> 
> (The bondage may have gone a bit past 'light,' depending on your definition. I hope you don't mind.)

They don't need many words anymore, not for this familiar ritual. Margot lifts her dress over her head, rustling loud in the warm quiet of the barn. She lets it drift into a puddle on the straw and reaches back to unhook her bra. Behind her, out of sight, her wife stands close, breath gusting over the back of Margot's neck, hands busy with her hairpins.

She drops the bra onto the dress with a small, relieved sigh, lifting her breasts a little in her hands, shifting them, enjoying the freedom of movement. Alana chuckles and presses a kiss to the side of Margot's head, hands gathering and carding through her hair before letting it drop loose around her shoulders. She doesn't have to tell her to leave the stockings and garter belt on. After almost three years of marriage, they each understand the little details the other appreciates.

Margot leans back a little into Alana's body, feels hands stroke briefly down her shoulders and arms, wrapping around hers for a quick squeeze. Then she steps back, and Margot is standing alone in the dark barn, exposed to the waist and taking careful, even breaths. Letting herself start to sink, just the first little bit.

Then Alana's back, standing close, slipping the ropes around and under Margot's breasts.

It's meditative, rhythmic. The ropes tighten around her, smooth and constricting, but not anything she would qualify as painful. She jerks a little as they're pulled into place, as knots are tied sudden and tight. Steady hands cross her wrists behind her back, bind them firmly together. Then, the chest harness done, Alana reaches up for ropes already attached to the hard points they've installed in sturdy beams above, and the clever winching devices designed to help compensate for the balance she's lacking, the parts of her body that can no longer communicate or support as designed.

Margot leans back against the rigging now attaching her to the barn. She's learned not to steel herself against the first, disorienting shift as she is tugged and hoisted away from solid ground, hissing a little at the sudden pressure of the ropes against her ribcage, her upper arms. Gravity doesn't let go of her easily, and while she isn't providing the force that lifts her, there is still a struggle, an effort she has to make towards letting go of her footing, accepting and processing the pain as she is pulled, implacably, in two directions at once.

Then the ropes around her right thigh engage, beginning to even her out with a new source of sensation, a balance of pain. She tilts, swinging a little, dizzily. Quick, clever hands weave around her, looping more rope around each ankle. Tying between the main lines, fortifying the design. Margot is pulled into a new shape, hanging on her side, her legs bent behind her. She shifts a little, feeling the stretch, the still just-bearable pressure each place the ropes hold her up.

She closes her eyes, disoriented and overwhelmed, and lets the sensations wash over her. Breathes in, breathes out. Senses Alana standing close, a reassuring hand resting just lightly at her elbow. Another brushing errant strands of hair out of her face. The the pain begins to blur, she passes some invisible barrier and then 

she is

floating.

Eyes still closed as the world drops away.

Dimly, she's still aware of the points of pressure that tether her to the ceiling, but they're no longer something she has to fight or endure. The warm hands stroking her face, her hair, are comforting but distant as the far-off sounds of contented, sleepy horses in the stalls, or the smell of leather and hay. The endorphins hum in her blood, and her body droops against the ropes, tension bleeding away. Wrapped in nothing, in her own warm flesh and the unintrusive air, Margot drifts.

 

When she was finally free after a lifetime of fear and vigilance, the relief that she had been waiting for for as long as she could remember just ... hadn't come. As the months passed and the halfhearted investigation into Mason's death had fizzled away, as Alana locked up her own monster and they began to talk about building a life, a future … Margot couldn't figure out how to believe in it.

She would lie in the dark of the bed she shared with the woman she had definitely, definitively fallen in love with the night they'd murdered her brother, fighting to breathe her way through the vicious cycle of bright, sharp-edged thoughts that would not let her rest.

Alana had said, when he was here, your mind was your best escape. You had to go away from yourself in order to survive what was happening. But now that he's gone from the world, he's still inside your head. You need to come back to your body, to make your sanctuary there.

Margot hadn't known the way, but they'd found it together.

 

As she sinks into her body's bliss, suspended and untouchable by anything in the world except one chosen person, she is finally, completely safe.

[ ](http://photobucket.com/)


End file.
